First year experiences in higher education and academic performance

​The purpose of this paper is to analyse students’ experiences during, and right after, their transition to higher education. The aim is to identify factors that are related to higher academic performance. We account for heterogeneity in the student population by controlling for previous academic performance and other background variables such as gender, age and parents’ educational level. Preliminary results suggest that academic integration between students, and between students and faculty staff, early in the study programme, as well as positive experiences with the transition to higher education, are correlated with higher academic performance. We use data from The Norwegian National Student Survey (2018) which has about 31 000 respondents.